BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. He is restoring the Party. He is rewriting your textbooks.

In the novel "Nineteen-Eighty-Four," Joseph Stalin's totalitarian Soviet regime inspired George Orwell to paint a dark world of perpetual government surveillance, passive mind control, and the political manipulation of news and history. Big Brother and the Party control everything.

When we meet Winston Smith, the protagonist, he is a low-level bureaucrat in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. From his small cubicle, Winston's job is to rewrite the past -- historical documents and news articles -- to ensure Big Brother is never wrong.

In other departments of the Ministry, employees "vaporize" political dissidents and re-create the past as if the dissidents had never existed.

If Orwell had written for Texas, the Ministry of Truth is where you would find the Texas State Board of Education. In Orwellian fashion, the SBOE recently proposed a state social studies curriculum that rewrites Texas and American history and vaporizes the unwanted.

The vote was 10-5 along party lines, with a conservative Republican bloc in the majority.

These Winst

ons are unashamedly open in their ideological mission to revise the past. Board member Don McLeroy, a Republican from Bryan, has said, "We are adding balance.

History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

True to form, Texas schoolchildren will not learn in Texas textbooks that Hispanic Tejanos fought alongside Anglo Texians at the Alamo in 1836. With a single vote, the SBOE vaporized heroes like Juan Abamillo, Juan A. Badillo and Gregorio Esparza.

Neither will the civil-rights work of the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund or the League of United Latin American Citizens be taught in schools. With a state student population that is 44 percent Hispanic, the SBOE repeatedly ignored the central role of Hispanics in Texas' history.

This is the "balanced" world of the SBOE.

There are too many examples of the political and ideological revisions the SBOE made to a curriculum that will stand for the next 10 years -- but the most egregious is the vaporization of Thomas Jefferson and the First Amendment.

As it turns out, Jefferson coined the phrase separation of church and state in a letter to the Danbury Baptists. In the world of the "Christian" SBOE faction, this is akin to heresy.

Remember, Big Brother can never be wrong. SBOE member David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont, said, "I reject the notion by the Left of a constitutional separation of church and state."

What is ironic for the SBOE is that this is a biblical concept as well as a secular one. In Luke 20:22, Jesus is asked, "Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?"

Jesus answers, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God things which be God's."

In John 18:36, Jesus says, on his way to the cross, to Pontius Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world."

In other words, the state and the church are separate. Even the Baptist General Convention of Texas' Christian Life Commission expressed dismay that the board rejected the First Amendment over politics.

The SBOE concept of a church-run state is not an original one. In fact, Iran has a theocratic democracy that may serve as a model for the SBOE.

In that country, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is subordinate to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, a religious cleric. And upon closer inspection, it is a world not unlike that of "Nineteen-Eighty-Four."

The SBOE will hold a final vote on the curriculum standards in May.

E. Anthony Martinez is product of Texas public schools and a graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso in Chicano Studies. He is thankful the SBOE never voted on that curriculum.